Monday, April 24, 1972
War's Cruel Fate Puts Tiny Town On The Map
CHON THANH --Every other day, a senior American military adviser explained, the road to Chon Thanh, embattled Highway 13, was opened by South Vietnamese who make a brisk sweep through sniper fire and sharp, deadly clashes."Beaucoup VC" a guard at a checkpoint had warned the day before, refusing to let a civilian vehicle proceed down the road. But this was Friday -an "every day." The driver nodded his way past the checkpoint and sped down the highway -past splintered rubber trees, fires started by searing white phosphorous shells, landmarks that included a bus that had been blown up by a mine and looked like a trampled toy.Helicopters fluttered overhead, scanning the woods that could screen an ambush. The car rattled over something that felt like large-sized gravel -empty shell casings from the 50 cal., machine guns south Vietnamese troops had used to fight off attackers who ambushed their convoy.In other times, it would have been easy to whisk through Chon Thanh without a glance. Just a conglomerate of wooden shacks with tin canopies and straw roofs. Charcoal kilns looked like anthills. Livestock grazed in front yards.One could easily pass a lazy and peaceful life here -except that history has singled out Chon Thanh for an ugly little bit part. The town lies only 15 miles below An Loc, which North Vietnamese troops have vowed to seize and make into a revolutionary capital.Townspeople who wanted to live out an uneventful life here heard distant rumbles, then sharp crashes. Suddenly there were screeches and thunderous booms -rockets. And now the townspeople were being prodded out by fear.All along the highway they came in pathetic and monotonous procession -people who looked quietly, desperate and hopeless, shuttering their shops and homes and leaving their streets and yards to watchful, uneasy soldiers.They packed busses and trucks in smothering heaps, sitting atop pyramids of rice and furniture. Bicycles were carefully piled in neat stacks -for a good, well-tended one is a Cadillac in Chon Thanh.A very few remained. They stood in doorways or sat under trees. Children had jumped and wept when daylight thunder sounded in the morning and again at noon. Now they mindlessly played on the dirt sidewalks beside the highway -for it thrusts right through this unfortunate little town.A small woman motioned to strangers and took them beyond the roadside houses, toward a wispy column of smoke. She was slight and workworn -a figurine in the classic mold of the peasant. But now, stopping beside an ash head, she re-enacted the terror at noon -dropped expertly and professionally to the ground as she showed how she had flattened herself as one of the shrill horrors sputtered in.This was -or had been -her home: A heap of broken sandbags and smoldering timbers looked like a log fort after an Indian raid. The blast had destroyed the backyard bunker. No modern, well-appointed home in Chon Thanh is without one.Asked why she hadn't left before this happened, the woman had the numbly fatalistic Vietnamese answer: "My family lives here."None, fortunately, had been hurt. But now she was dispossessed resident who would likely become a refugee -donning a mask of despair before she joined the procession south."War's Cruel Fate Puts Tiny Town on the Map", by Hal Drake, published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes on Monday, April 24, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.